S.F. Emporium site in limbo

Louis Trager, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 28, 1995

1995-12-28 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco is still likely to get its Bloomingdale's, a Federated Department Stores source said Thursday - a day after the company officially left the issue in limbo.

But the pivotal Emporium space on Market Street, which the glitzy Bloomingdale's has been expected to replace, would stay vacant for 18 months to two years while tens of millions of dollars in remodeling and earthquake retrofitting were done, said the source, who asked not to be identified.

Federated, which owns Bloomingdale's, announced plans Wednesday for several stores in the Emporium chain, which the company bought in October.

* The Market Street store will close in mid-March - and its 500 employees are not guaranteed jobs after the closing.

* The Emporium store at Stanford Shopping Center will be converted to an upscale Bloomingdale's next November, Federated said.

* The stores at Southland Mall in Hayward and Newpark Mall in Newark will become Macy's, the chain Federated bought in 1994. That will make a total of 95 Macy's stores in the West, to be run from divisional headquarters in San Francisco.

The company also announced plans for converting three of its Broadway stores in Southern California into Bloomingdale's. These are in Century City in west Los Angeles, Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley and Newport Beach in Orange County.

It also said it will close Macy's Paul Avenue warehouse in San Francisco in early spring.

Even after this, the second such announcement flurry since mid-November, Federated said it hadn't settled yet on dispositions for the Market Street store or those at Hilltop Mall in Richmond and Valley Fair Mall, which straddles the San Jose-Santa Clara limit. Their futures should be resolved within six months, the company said.

The Examiner reported in October that Federated intended to convert the downtown and Stanford and most likely the Valley Fair stores to Bloomingdale's.

However, $40 million to $60 million in work needs to be done on the old, 428,000-square-foot Market Street Emporium building, according to the Federated source, who asked not to be identified.

That's terrible news to Carolyn Diamond, executive director of the Market Street Association business group. But she says its better than the alternative, which would be for Federated to sell the property.

"If Bloomingdale's is going to come - and I can't imagine why Market Street wouldn't be a first priority - we would just have to grin and bear it for those 18 months," Diamond said. If they sell it off, it could be years before something came in there. It could be disastrous."

She said Bloomingdale's is of major importance to downtown because "it would be that last link in making Market Street a major retail district, moving away from Union Square," Diamond said.

Meantime, though, there's a ray of good news for San Francisco bargain hunters.

The Market Street store is slated to serve as a clearance center for the entire Emporium chain until the store closes forever in mid-March, according to Marge Caldwell, an official of the union representing San Francisco Emporium employees.

As for her union's members, Caldwell said they "were obviously upset even though knew it (the closure announcement) was coming. We will negotiate severance and try to place as many people as possible at Macy's."

The 500 employees got no promises of future employment with Federated - unlike the 114 employees of Macy's warehouse on Paul Avenue in San Francisco, many of whom the company said it would find Bay Area jobs.

Federated, which already owned Bloomingdale's, bought Macy's in 1994 and then bought Emporium last October, promising to convert some stores to Macy's or Bloomingdale's and close the rest.

Federated said Wednesday that it might announce more California Bloomingdale's in the next few months. They will be the only Bloomingdale's stores west of Minnesota.

Speculation on the delay in announcing the downtown Bloomingdale's centered on the need to resolve contractual obligations, created by a previous Emporium ownership, to the adjacent San Francisco Shopping Centre, which houses Nordstrom, specialty stores and restaurants.

Details of the contractual obligations were not available.

Federated will want to clear the way for the anticipated Bloomingdale's conversion and announce it by February, so it can get the work under way and have time to get the store open in time for the 1997 holiday season, a company source said.

Federated previously announced that the Stonestown Galleria Emporium would become a Macy's, and the stores in San Mateo's Hillsdale Mall and downtown Oakland would become Sears.

Clearance sales at Emporiums will start next month.

With a full-line Macy's store, a separate Macy's men's store that used to be I. Magnin, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, Stanford has the heaviest concentration of upscale shopping in Northern California, apart from downtown San Francisco.